Monday, August 20, 2012

My First
Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin
experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first
rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Patricia Ann McNair, author of a collection of short stories, The Temple of Air, which was called “a beautiful book, intense and original,” by Audrey Niffenegger, and was selected as the winner of Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award. Patricia Ann McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the
Midwestern United States. She’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door
to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate
Professor in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where
she received a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the
Year. Visit her website here and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

My First Bully

When the name showed up in my queue of friend requests on
Facebook, I actually shivered. She found me. She: my first bully. With the
upcoming launch of my debut story collection, The Temple of Air, I was doing what they tell you to do—reaching
out on social media, making new friends, reuniting with old ones, connecting. I’d been pimping my book, too, putting up posts about future readings,
interviews, workshops, etc. Friends I hadn’t seen in decades—girls, mostly (but
not only), from high school—were confirming my friend invitations, and others
were sending me theirs. It was fun to see the pictures on those profiles. Who
had hair; who didn’t? Who had gotten fat, beautiful, successful, married,
remarried, and more or less interesting than I thought they were when we were
seventeen?

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when she found me,
my first bully, but I was. Her name is different now, a new last name with the
maiden name in the middle; the first name more girly than what she went by when
we were kids. But the tight smile on her profile picture was the one I
remembered from when we first met at a playground when I was what—five? Six? The time she made me sit absolutely still on one of those old swing sets with
rubbery seats and metal chains while she twisted the swing in such a way that
it caught my fingers in the links, pinching them, making them bleed. I remember
her telling me I’d better not say anything to anyone. She knew how to find me. She would really hurt me.

She became a mean teenager, getting into fights in the
school parking lot, performing small acts of vandalism. She was from a very
screwed up home, I know that now; I think I knew that then. A single mother. Boyfriends passing through like potential buyers at an open house. She was almost
certainly abused. She would make an interesting character in one of my stories;
I could love her and hate her in the pages I write. Mostly, though, I hated
her. She scared me.

So when I saw her name in the requests, I was tempted to hit
“ignore.” But I was already engaged in social media conversation with two or
three of our common friends, and I figured what the hell. Maybe she had
changed. I know that I have—but that’s another story. So I confirmed the
request, and almost immediately, she started to write slightly nasty posts on
my wall. One of the failures of social media particularly, and electronic
communication in general, is that tone can so often be misinterpreted. Perhaps
she didn’t mean for it to sound bitchy when she answered my open call for workshop
participants with something like “I don’t care what yur doing this summer. Im
spending it with my family.” Maybe, when she sent me two or three questions in
a single post and I didn’t answer all of them at once, and she quickly wrote
back in all caps: “YOU DIDNT ANSER MY QUESTION!!!!” she meant it to be funny or
something. Do you think?

But I began to feel trapped, jittery. And when she started
to send me notes about my upcoming book that she had advance-ordered, telling
me that I almost certainly had got our childhood wrong and she couldn’t wait to
prove it (despite the fact that my book is not about my childhood at all, not
even set in the suburbs where we grew up) I could practically smell her hot,
tuna-fish-salad breath like I could that long ago day on the swings.

She made sure to tell me when the book had arrived—writing some
sneering comment that made me very uneasy but now I can’t recall. I worried and
waited for her response to the stories, as though awaiting a long-anticipated
review that might actually matter. But here’s the thing. I never heard from her
again. I don’t know why. I’ve resisted the urge to stalk her profile page and
timeline to see if she is still out there, or if maybe, (forgive me, I almost
wrote “mercifully” here,) she has died or something. In my own little
imagination, I picture her starting to read the book (she’d be fat now, in my
imagination, and wrinkled and in need of hair color) and recognizing quickly
that it is not what she had hoped: some sort of tell-all memoir that she wanted
(or didn’t want) to have a role in. She was not a good student. For some
reason, many of my friends were not. They were interesting people with
complicated families and homes who liked sex and drugs and good times and who
mostly have grown up well and responsible in the suburbs. I have heard from a
number of them about my book, how they read it, how they liked it, how they
have recommended it to others. A part of me wants to imagine that my first
bully wasn’t smart enough to read my book, to understand it, to know that
despite the many sad stories in it, it is ultimately about hope, about love. I
imagine my first bully to be a reader of happy stories, easy stories, the
stories with morals and messages—despite the possible absence of these things
in her own life.

I can’t stop thinking about the weird anxiety that hit me
when this woman showed up again. Clearly it had to do with whatever childhood
trauma I still felt on some level, but more than that, I think it has to do
with the insecurity every writer must feel. Once we put our work out there, it
is (we are) vulnerable to whatever attacks may come, and I think, no matter how
confident we are in the work, we fear the strikes and barbs of others. Writing
is not a safe business. Our words on the page often leave us unprotected and
perhaps even a little naked. Is it unreasonable to worry about bullies?

I have a small scar on my ring finger knuckle from that day
on the swing set a million years ago. I can still see it. It won’t go away. Not entirely.

7 comments:

Patty McNair, you are a big-hearted writer and a big-hearted person. That's evident here and in the pages of "Temple." But I'm also glad you've got enough Chicago in you to imagine your bully in need of hair color. Ha!

A bully in my life unwittingly loaned me his name for a character, a death-row inmate, who ate a particularly nasty last meal. I felt small doing that, but still took pleasure in it. Being a writer isn't the same as being a saint, I guess.

Michael Downs, thanks so much for reading and commenting. I love your response to your own bully--perhaps I will be brave enough to try that myself sometime. Thanks, too, to David Abrams for giving me the chance to share this.

Patty, this made my heart ache! But it also made me smile with lines like: "Boyfriends passing through like potential buyers at an open house." Too good! I'm glad she's drifted back out of your life and believe we all appreciate our lives a little more by the scars we carry. I look forward to reading The Temple of Air.

Hi. I made up an alternate narrative for you. She probably read the book and couldn't reply because she felt deeply touched or moved. I bet you made her cry. I bet you made her feel. I bet she went through that emotional roller coaster that we all do when we read. Her earlier spitful comments were about your old relationship and her desire to pick on you again, but once she read you...you knocked her down. What could she say? It's the power of words.

The Quivering Pen

The Quivering Pen's motto can be summed up in two words: Book Evangelism. The blog is written and curated by David Abrams, author of the novels Brave Deeds (Grove/ Atlantic, 2017) and Fobbit (Grove/ Atlantic, 2012), from his home office in Butte, Montana. It is fueled by early-morning cups of coffee, the occasional bowl of Cheez-Its, and a lifelong love of good books.